Online social networks are becoming increasingly particular. An online social network (hereinafter “social networks”) is network in which users can browse profiles of their established “friends”, friends of those friends, and so forth. However, social networks such as MySpace, Yahoo! 360, and Facebook do not leverage existing relationships that users have already established using their respective instant messaging clients. Social networks often require users to import, mass add, specify permissions, and wait for approval from each friend. Thus, the process for a user to get started in a social network is relatively long and cumbersome even though the user may already be associated with a messenger list (outside of the social network) that is rich with contact information.
Relationships on a social network are public, while relationships that are established using an instant messaging client are private. An instant messaging client does not automatically expose those private relationships. Furthermore, an instant messaging client should not automatically expose those private relationships because some contacts of a particular user may wish to remain unknown to most, if not all, users other than the particular user.
Based on the foregoing, there is a need to create a social network that leverages existing private relationships (e.g., in an instant messaging client) without the overhead of massive permissioning, i.e., allowing certain users certain rights to see content.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.